How to Plan For Your Next Homeschool Year

6/20/2021

How to Plan Your Next Homeschool Year (Year 2 For Us)

I love planning the next year of homeschool!! It’s a time filled with so many possibilities and ideals that you hope and pray to bring to fruition the upcoming year. Today I’m going to walk you through my process of planning and give you a sneak peek into the books and curriculum we have lined up for my upcoming year 2.

This post may include affiliate links. If you click and make a purchase based on my recommendation, I get a small remuneration at no extra expense to you. I only recommend things I actually use and believe to be a blessing.

Here's a video I did that shows you exactly what I do. For more detailed info, please continue reading below:

The first thing I do really is to scour the internet for the best price on books. I know I can get many of these books at the library but mostly they’re checked out for months when you’re in the school season, so I look to purchase them at the least expensive rate possible. It’s an investment I don’t mind making seeing as I’ll be using them again 2 more times with my boys.

My initial places to search are Amazon, eBay, Book Outlet and others that I just Google to see what comes up with the best price and hopefully free shipping. I do pretty well on eBay though to tell you the truth. (Video of me opening an eBay package.)

Once the bulk of my books have come in, I start my real planning and organizing.

Step 1: Print Out Curriculum Book List & Necessary Info

Luckily, the amazing Ambleside Online advisory continues help us homeschooling mamas by updating the curriculum book lists, footnotes, enrichment schedules, weekly schedules, etc. so I just print out the whole of the year I’ll be planning out for the upcoming year.
Some AO mamas have actually compiled all the years into a Teacher Guide of sorts so that they already have everything printed out and on hand. I’ve opted to print year by year and putting it at the front of the kids portfolio’s for the year to be able to refer to quickly. But you never know, I might just get the itch to compile all this into one big book of all the years one of these days. Sounds like a project I’d take on at least, lol.

Step 2: Take Out Any Books You Already Have For The Upcoming Year

I gather all the books I’ve been ordering online for the upcoming year. I usually start the process of ordering in the last 3-4 weeks of school from the year before. Something that helps with this is to make an amazon list of each year of books. Then whenever you have a moment you can start cross referencing that list with other sites and even set up notifications on certain sites to let you know when that book or books are being sold at a certain price range.

Step 3: Cross Reference Books With Book List
(Make a list of books you still need to borrow or purchase.)

After gathering all the books, I begin the process of checking them off the book list. I don’t know about you, but the small task of checking things off gives me soooo much pleasure! More importantly, this process helps me to make sure I haven’t missed any books. Inevitably, I always miss something so I make an additional short list of those books and special materials I’ll be needing.
Step 4: Label Books (We label according to year the book is used.)
I’ve begun labeling my books because I want to be sure that I keep all the books that are part of the core curriculum for each year. I created this quick watercolor brush stroke label with a different color for each year. I’ll post it in my website for you to grab for free in case you’re interested. I used address labels I had on hand to get this task done quickly.
I have seen other homeschools classify and organize their yearly books by using a multi dot system. They buy the circle sticker dots at the dollar store and then assign each year a color and simply put that color dot on the correct stack of books’ spines.
What I chose to do is a riff of that idea, but just using what I already had on hand and in more neutral colors.

Step 5: Organize the Books

What to do with this huge stack of books at this point? Well, I’m just filing them back into the system I set up last year to keep the books organized by subject. You can also organize them into a bookshelf by year as well.

Step 6: Plan Out Schedules

(This year, I'm not making my own schedule from scratch. I'm using one that an amazing mama made in the AO FB Group and tailoring it to our homeschool this year. You can see glimpses of it in the YouTube video above. To get access to that original file, you must become a member of the Ambleside Online Facebook Group and search the group for "schedule".)

This is by far my favorite thing to do! Taking a look at the different curriculums I’m pulling together for my kids and how I’m going to weave them together can be intricate, but so exciting! At least for me. I kept things very simple last year and kept to only 3 curriculums for my daughter. That was very plug and play because the bulk of that curriculum was AO, then our Math curriculum, and then our Nature Study Curriculum.

This year, my son is 100% at home with us starting his kinder year and I want to be sure that I am planning subjects that they do together, which subjects my kids will do apart, and what days certain books might be better to do. Then adding more of a structure to our Poetry Tea Time, Nature Study and other subjects I want to try and do better this year. It’s all so exciting! I know this is going to be such a special, enriching year!

Then at last I print out the schedules, I print out the bookmarks, cut the bookmarks and place them in the books we’ll be using them in and overall just start organizing what will become our portfolio for the end of the year.

(The bookmarks are also from the resources available in the AO FB Group. Seriously, this group is nothing short of incredible!)

It all takes a couple of days of work, but it starts this buzz of excitement for the year ahead! I know that we just started our summer vacation time and there’s so much to look forward to in this time of rest. However, I know I’ll be dropping hints of what we’ll be up to in the upcoming year to my kids and hopefully that’ll start kindling that fire within them to start the year.

I hope all this kindles your fire to start the planning process, that you enjoy it all and don’t give in to overwhelm. If you need help, please ask! Hope this helps you, inspires you and gets you fired up for your next homeschool year!